It’s September and I’m ten years old and eating a Sabrett hot dog at Shea as the Mets lose to the Expos. The 1992 Mets may have gone down as one of the worst teams money could buy, but to me they’re blue and gray and orange Gods of the diamond, supernatural creatures doing superhuman feats on my very own field of dreams and nothing will stop me from root, root, rooting for them.
This is another Uncle Jim outing since my parents spend their weekends negotiating their divorce. My little sister Stephanie was forced to come along too. But that’s fine because Steady Eddie Murray is up and though he’s not playing well and we all know the umpires have it in for him, everyone is up in their seats and the Sabrett onions are running red and slimy down my arm and Stephanie says “my tummy hurts” and I say “shut up, Eddie Murray is up,” pronouncing Murray like Mur-ray like a stingray or ray of sunshine instead of the correct Mur-ree like furry because I don’t know, it sounds fancier and what could be fancier than eating a genuine Sabrett at Shea?
But William A. Shea is dead and the Mets are on life support and my uncle, even drunker than usual, spills just a tiny drop or two—accidentally of course, he’s not mean, he’s just a sloppy drunk and boisterous fan—of his Bud on the old lady in front of him. Uh-oh, this Bud’s for you.
The old lady, enjoying getting taken out to the ballgame, doesn’t even notice. But her grandsons do. Both of them. And they’re huge and they stand up from either side of her like monsters from an orange-blue sea and one says, “Did you spill beer on my gramma, motherfucker?”
Uncle Jim is drunk but sober enough to assess his odds, admit his mistake, and make amends. He says, “Fellas, an accident. An honest accident. Let me buy you a round. A couple of Buds and Sabretts, huh, and we can all enjoy the game.” He eyes my sister and I nervously, the dutiful uncle.
In response, the other brother throws his beer in my uncle’s face—I see it still, the froth across his shirt, in his graying mustache, his eyes—and my uncle, middle-aged but spry ConEd electrician and Air Cav Vietnam War vet, forgets his niece and nephew, forgets his odds, even, incredibly, forgets the Mets, and launches himself at the man in front of him like a mustachioed missile, punching and kicking and teaching me a whole textbook of novel curses in the thirty seconds or so it takes for the brothers to break his nose and blacken both his eyes and knock him two rows down where he’s restrained by some fellow Mets fans who appreciate the excitement. More signs of life in the stands than on the field.
Security comes and we’re swept up like so much stadium trash and brought to a room in the bowels of Shea. One guard sits us on a bench outside the room while my uncle tries to sweet talk the security higher-ups inside to avoid getting the cops involved.
I ask the guard how Murray did.
“Struck out,” he says.
Stephanie takes my hand and says, “I want to go home.”
The guard disappears into the room for a minute and returns, handing me a box of Cracker Jacks and a Mr. Met bobblehead doll before disappearing again.
I open the box for Stephanie and she inhales a handful and promptly throws up on my shoes. The vomit is thin, reddish on the concrete floor and watery as the Sabrett onion sauce, with half-chewed Cracker Jacks floating in it like little popcorn icebergs.
We sit like that for a while, the vomit soaking into my shoes, Mr. Met’s dumb grinning baseball head bobbling at us. My uncle emerges from the room holding his blood-soaked t-shirt and wearing a new one with the Tasmanian Devil in a Mets uniform.
“Good folks here cleared me of all charges,” he says. “The head of security is a fellow veteran and Mets fan. But we’ve got to clear out for today.”
Stephanie starts crying. I stand and I want to cry too. The floor feels mushy in my vomit-soggy shoes, wobbly, just as my world feels wobbly as my parents and their lawyers decide where we’ll live and who will raise us.
Jim picks up Stephanie and says “Don’t worry, darling, we can catch the rest of the game on the radio.” Then he taps Mr. Met’s head making it bobble and asks me, “How did Steady Eddie do?”